heir mad course, waved to warn, and
shouted unheard. Then Rhoda stood up and signalled and screamed for help.
She thought that the wind carried her cry, for both boats put about and
headed towards them. Hope rose: two well-manned boats were in pursuit.
Terror rose: in an instant Christian, to a perilous measure of sail added
more, and the boat, like a maddened, desperate thing, went hurling,
bucking, smashing, over the waves, against the waves, through the waves.

Rhoda shut her eyes and tried to pray, that when the quivering, groaning
planks should part or sink, and drop her out of life, her soul should
stand at its seemliest in her Maker's sight. But the horrible lurches
abating, again she looked. Pursuit was abandoned, soon proved vain to men
who had lives of value and a cargo of weight: they had fallen back and
were standing away.

The sun blazed on his downward stoop, with a muster of clouds rolling to
overtake him before he could touch the edge of the world. In due time
full storm would come as surely as would the night.

Christian over the gunwale stared down. He muttered to himself; whenever
a white sea-bird swooped near he looked up and laughed again. Wild and
eager, his glance turned ever to the westward sea, and never looked he to
the sky above with its threat of storm, and naught cared he for the peril
of death sweeping up with every wave.

A dark coast-line came forward, that Rhoda knew for the ominous place
that had overshadowed Christian's life. The Isle Sinister rose up, a blot
in the midst of lines of steady black and leaping white.

Over to the low sun the clouds reached, and half the sky grew splendid
with ranges of burnished copper, and under it the waves leaped into
furious gold. Rhoda's courage broke for the going down of her last sun;
she wept and prayed in miserable despair for the life, fresh and young,
and good to live, that Christian was wantonly casting away with his own.
No hope dare live with night and storm joining hands, and madness driving
on the cruelest coast known.

On they drove abreast of the Isle Sinister.

He clung swaying to the tiller, with groaning breath, gaping with a wide
smile and ravenous looks fixed intently. A terror of worse than death
swept upon Rhoda. She fell on her knees and prayed, shrieking: 'Good Lord
deliver us!'

Christian looked at her; for the only time with definite regard, he
turned a strange dazed look to her.

A violent shock flung her forward;